1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an imaging device and method, computer program product on a computer-readable medium and an imaging system, for surveillance of a wide-range scene by means of a panoramic image obtained by imaging with sequential shifting of the imaging direction.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the electronic still cameras having been used widely in the past, light having passed through a lens by releasing the shutter of the camera to image an object can be converted into an image signal by a solid-state image sensor such as CCD (charge-coupled device) and the image signal be recorded to a recording medium. The image signal once recorded can be read out of the recording medium for reproduction. Many of the electronic still cameras have a monitor capable of displaying a captured still image and on which a selected one of the still images having so far been recorded in the recording medium can be displayed. In the electronic still camera, an image signal supplied to the monitor corresponds to an object per screen. For this reason, each of the images displayed simultaneously on the monitor is limited in size and thus cannot be used for simultaneous surveillance of any wide-range scene.
On this account, there have been more and more prevailing surveillance cameras permitting surveillance of a wide-range scene by imaging an object with sequential shifting of the imaging direction to produce a panoramic image formed from a plurality of unit images. Recently, there have been proposed a technique of shrinking/synthesizing a plurality of video signals to produce a video signal of one frame (as in the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 108163 of 1998) and also a centralized surveillance/recording system capable of collecting surveillance video signals from a plurality of existing surveillance video cameras and recording the signals to a recording medium such as video tape for the purpose of surveillance (as in the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2000-243062).